


Something Wicked

by PetrarchanConceit



Category: Final Fantasy XIV, Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake, Il nome della rosa | The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
Genre: Fey/Fiend AU, M/M, Masturbation on the Vault...again, fey!haurchefant, fiend!estinien, incubus!aymeric
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-17
Updated: 2021-02-18
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:33:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27054988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PetrarchanConceit/pseuds/PetrarchanConceit
Summary: The Feylands are home to all types of dreams.  But the Fiendfell is something else.  It's composed of fears, for a start.  Not a knife-wielding-maniac kind of terror, that's still for the nightmares, but the overwhelming collective dread of "What Comes After" -- particularly what comes after when one has not behaved oneself.  Every type of Hell lives in the Fiendfell.  Ishgard is one of them.
Relationships: Aymeric de Borel/Estinien Wyrmblood, Haurchefant Greystone/Warrior of Light
Comments: 52
Kudos: 42





	1. Ishgard Hell

**Author's Note:**

> This is just a creepy, Halloween-themed thing I was working on before I started the Nutcracker thing, mostly because I freaking LOVE Gormenghast and I re-read it every October. The first time I read the trilogy, I actually had to have a dictionary right next to me to look up all the new words, and it was still sooo very worth it. Fortunately, subsequent readings have taken place on a tablet, and while I hate not being able to make notes in the margins of a hard copy, I cannot deny the joy of having an instant digitized dictionary at my fingertips, especially while reading novels like Peake's "Titus Groan" and "The Name of the Rose" by Umberto Eco.
> 
> This weird story was absolutely inspired by thesparklingone's preternaturally awesome "The Thief and The Knight," and by Nightmist's both preternaturally and supernaturally awesome "Shadows on the Snow." Having read both those stories, well, more times than I probably should have, I became overwhelmed by the desire to have my own vulnerable, Dark AU Aymeric with which to play...though not like a cat with a mouse, I promise. Well, not for long at least.

Half-Fey or Half-Fiend, either way he was Half-fucked. Mind you, the Feylands were better than the Fiendfell for a Half-breed, despite what had happened to his friend Haurchefant, but only a little -- mostly because of what had happened to his friend Haurchefant. The Feylands were made up of dreams, many of them not even the kind you have when you're sleeping, and nightmares are dreams too; one has to keep that in mind. Dreams can break too, go unfulfilled until they turn into big leaking bags of despondency. The Feylands are home to all types of dreams. But the Fiendfell is something else. It's composed of fears, for a start. Not a knife-wielding-maniac kind of terror, that's still for the nightmares, but the overwhelming collective dread of "What Comes After" -- particularly what comes after when one has not behaved oneself. Every type of Hell lives in the Fiendfell. Ishgard is one of them.

He was born there, in the 'Fell, in Ishgard, his Fey mother having stumbled over from Gridania, one of the Dream-Realms of the Feylands, while participating in the drunken rite-of-passage that Fey undertook upon coming of age. Apparently breaching the boundaries of the 'Fell was some sort of perverse "test of courage." This rather insulting notion, that the Fiendfell was a place frightful enough to serve as the site of such a test, suggested that the Fey had no notion of a rather fundamental feature of their neighboring territory: not all beings who populate the 'Fell are particularly fiendish. Collective dread is often more focused upon the overarching architecture of the environment, flaming pits or dark empty silence, the overall oeuvre. That kind of thinking doesn't often extend beyond the look of the populace, pointed horns and tails or white faces and scribbled holes for eyes. Once born, however, these Fiends have an inner world that's entirely their own; they can choose to behave however they see fit.

And demons can be terribly sexy when they have a mind to be, slinking around in their too-tight leather trousers and staring at you with those mooning, woe-is-me "I didn't mean to fall" eyes. His late mother, bless her silver hair and flittering, filmy, gossamer wings, was a goner. Certainly, it did naught to diminish his chances that Alberic's first glimpse of his future wife occurred when he swooped down from the skies to thrust his lance clean through one of the mouldering old Dravanians who still thought it worth his while to assault the equally mouldering Ishgard, saving the woman's life in the process. Alberic had the too-tight leathers down pat, truly, but as he had never been the type of Fiend to moon over much of anything, he was somewhat surprised to find those same leather trousers down around his ankles later that evening. Estinien arrived some moons later.

He found himself, as he grew, born into an Ishgard that was slowly rotting. Heavy misting fogs circled up from the fetid abyss over which the dying city was somewhat crookedly perched. They curled themselves 'round slightly askew spires, leaving his home nigh perpetually damp and stinking of mildew. There used to be snow, Estinien had heard, soft, sparkling specks of lace that floated through the air, bringing, if not warmth, at least a sense of quiet, an enduring lull. Now there was only the mouldering mist -- mist and a relentless rain, heavy and always just around freezing so that it slicked up the ragged, cracked flagstones without ever giving way to that peaceful hush of snow.

The streets were always deserted when Estinien went out on his patrols; day or night they were ever empty, which is not to say that Ishgard lacked population. Whatever one wanted to say about Ishgardians, they were still rather good at breeding. It's just that most of the living that occurred in the city took place exclusively indoors. In crowded, dust-coated, smoke-choked rooms, Ishgardians languished by the dozen, whether they were highborns lounging in brittle lace and nap-worn velvet, or orphans of the Brume coughing while they stacked 'round eye-stinging grease fires.

Out of those suffocating, over-crowded rooms, now that he had, at a mere twenty-two Summers, assumed the role of Azure Dragoon from his father, Estinien found himself instead on the miserable, slush-filled streets.

He was a true prodigy, which helped a little, even more startlingly proficient in his dragoonish pyrotechnics than his own father; Estinien lit up the sky when he took to it. The problem was that there was no longer any real cause for him to do so, the last true encounter between dragon and man within Ishgard's walls having been the one that led to Estinien's being there in the first place, living and breathing and jumping at naught but shadows. Still, the Azure Dragoon was tradition, and there was nothing, _absolutely nothing_ the Holy See valued more highly than Tradition and Custom and Ritual, a decaying parade of enduring sameness.

So there was still an Azure Dragoon. And there were still the High Houses and the starving, withering, bone-thin Brume. And, of course, there was still the Church itself. If the Halone they worshipped was somewhat less fervent in her dispensation of justice, a Fury flagging, the Holy See was no less obdurate in its insistence on following her ostensible teachings to the letter. The Archbishop was still in place, wrinkled and sagging on his dull and tarnished throne, his Heavensward creaking around him in rusted armor. The tribunal still echoed with the skittering of its weasling, sharp-faced inquisitors, and the scholasticate still turned out its swell of both seminarians and those who might choose to cloister themselves more literally by taking on the robes of Halonic monks or nuns.

That's where Estinien first saw him, the boy who would become his very first friend. He was being herded out of the scholasticate by his keepers, he and a mess of other boys, all novices, lay brothers and oblates, their long robes dragging at their feet, water-logged and heavy from the accrued slush, as they crossed the Hoplon and headed toward the Vault itself. Watching distractedly as they passed, Estinien's eyes were immediately drawn to the figure that had begun to lag toward the back of the group, not because of any extraordinary physical feature that he possessed, but precisely because he presented no recognizable features at all. He was bundled entirely, hooded and goggled, gloved and gaitered, a mask cloaking even the lower half of his face. The boy, and he knew him as such only because of his monkish robes, seemed to be even draped in several separate layers of these, as though he were particularly prone to the cold or, possibly, because there was something about him, some secret beneath the layers, that needed containing.

"Wicked!" shouted the rear-most priest, shoving the bundled figure hard in the back, "Keep up!" Estinien rankled. The boy's layers, wetted heavy by the rain, were obviously starting to impede his ability to walk. He couldn't help but move more slowly from the weight of them. But the priests were ever poised at a simmering just beneath a boil, the slightest inconvenience provoking a violence that far out-stripped the minor irritation that was its cause. Apparently cruelty was a tradition too. Estinien jumped down.

"Can I help you, Father? Is aught amiss?" he asked the offending priest. The man was clearly startled. Estinien's heirloom drachen armor was one of the few things in Ishgard that had not fallen into disrepair over the course of the city's plodding and pointless thousand-year war with the Dravanians. Keeping its vicious-looking spikes and tines meticulously shined was tradition, and so it was done. It was, perhaps, this shine of the plate, a shine that caught even the smallest bit of Ishgard's dim, grey light, making the wearer burn bright against his surrounding dullness, that cowed the priest. He actually shielded his eyes against Estinien.

"Nothing to concern you, Ser Azure," muttered the priest, lips a tight line. "This reprobate novice's selfish insistence on plodding keeps his lay brothers longer in the wet than is good for them." He shoved the boy again, irritated at being caught out in his rancor. But Estinien was too quick, catching the young novice before the increased force of the shove thrust him to his knees. Without thinking, the dragoon simply scooped the boy up in his arms.

"Ah," the boy breathed out, startled at the contact, a single whisper-soft syllable, and yet that smallest of voiced exhalations made Estinien suddenly burn.

"Wait!" said the priest, a look of actual panic on his face this time. Estinien did not listen. Fevered now, nigh melting at the points where his and the boy's bodies met, even through their respective armor and layers of robes, Estinien instinctively took to the air to grasp some cooling relief. He jumped toward the Vault and deposited his charge at its doors.

"You...you touch that... _creature_ at your peril, Azure Dragoon," huffed out the priest, panting and bent over after sprinting to reach the dragoon and the boy. The rest of his party ran up behind him. "His Holiness will hear of this!" the cleric continued, knowing that the Archbishop was the only authority with which he could legitimately threaten Estinien. The Azure Dragoon, by right of tradition, was pretty much above all other Ishgardian censure.

Estinien looked at the boy again, wondering. The novice, in turn, just clasped his gloved hands together, worrying them against one another, and stared straight down at the ground.

"Come, Wicked," said the priest, grabbing the boy roughly by the shoulder to shove him through the doors that were opened for them. Estinien noticed that _he_ didn't hesitate to touch the boy; perhaps the priest enjoyed the sensation of burning. Then the party passed through and was gone. Estinien blinked. He shook his head and blinked again, as though he had to wake from a strange haze that had suddenly enveloped him. He decided to go home.

"Hmm," grunted out his father scooping the steaming, wine-based stew into a bowl to set before his son. "I'd heard they had an incubus up in the Vault." Alberic looked thoughtful. "Seems like you met the boy."

"An Incubus?" Oh. Well that explained quite a bit, Estinien thought to himself. He'd heard rumours enough about the church's treatment of the unfortunate beings born into _that_ specific demonic nomenclature to know that the boy's life could not be a pleasant one. He wondered.

The Feylands and the Fiendfell persisted together in one of those in-between spaces that slip between steadier worlds, a world that drew its existence from the collective dreams and dread of a more steady and fixed Source reality. The population of that Source spun these realities into existence, breathed life into their occupants, from the sheer overwhelming force of their _desires_ and their _anxieties_ and even, it was rumoured, their dearest _aspirations_. Paradise itself was rumoured to co-exist somewhere on this world that the Fey and 'Fell shared -- the very place where all the Heavens lived. Estinien snorted derisively at the thought. He'd never in his life seen even the barest hint of an Angel, and he didn't expect he ever would. He had resigned himself long ago to living within the borders of the Hell he occupied.

Still, some Hells are worse than others. It was almost inconceivable to Estinien what sort of vile acts could have fostered the dread that gave shape to an Incubus's early life in Ishgard. Always abandoned at birth -- nobody would willingly admit to having produced such a creature -- Incubi were traditionally sent to a particularly loathsome charitable institution run by priests who were convinced it was their foremost charge to make each and every one of the boys for whom they were responsible recognize and unquestioningly accept his complete degradation. Each child, whether he be christened Vile, Scorned, Wicked, or some alternative insinuated aspersion of his inner moral state, was daily drilled in the extent of his own worthlessness. Most of them could barely speak by the time they were ten summers old, for fear of poisoning the very air with the contagion of their breath. And their sole diversions from this misery were the very religious texts intent on confirming the self-hating doctrine their guardians spit at them every minute of their young lives.

Succubi were more common. His various sojourns into the Coerthas highlands, ever on the look-out for the slightest stir of Dravanian activity, provided Estinien with numerous acquaintances amongst _that_ wild tribe of free spirits. But the male version of their kind were not nearly as numerous, which actually made sense considering that the type of dread from which they were birthed was heavily infused with an unflagging belief that carnal depredation was exclusively female in nature. As such, males associated with such appetites, and their associated charms, were both rare and considered particularly perverse, particularly "wicked."

They were also, like their female counterparts, said to be unbelievably beautiful, a fact few in Ishgard were likely to be able to confirm because of the unrelenting bundling to which the incubi were subjected. As Estinien had observed himself that very afternoon, the boy he'd met in the Hoplon had been so thoroughly hooded, gloved, masked and goggled not even an inch of uncovered skin was visible.

Well, the dragoon thought to himself, suddenly feeling an entirely new sensation prickle warm in the depths of his belly, there was that smallest of spaces, high on the bridge of his nose, that neither his mask nor goggles managed to cover. Estinien found himself thinking of that space now, fixating on it even, as the sensation in his belly grew to a burning that spread lower. Several seconds later, he was truly mortified to find himself suddenly hardening within his armor, growing aroused beyond belief at the thought of that one tiny patch of the novice's exposed skin. The priest did warn that the boy was perilous to touch, he remembered. Perhaps this is what he meant.

Still hard, and growing ever more engorged by the minute, Estinien found himself landing amidst the Vault's spires without having been fully aware that he had yet taken to the air. Somewhere beneath him, he knew, the boy in the robes now slept, or prayed, or engaged in self-flagellation, both the figurative version of it, confined to his poor abused psyche and perhaps even a more literal one that involved hair-shirts and a striking leather strap. The dragoon grew even more rigid at that last thought. He needed relief.

Slipping his hand under the plate at his hips, under the more pliable scale encasing his full thighs, he drew out his cock and started stroking without thinking. Ah...the metal was cold. He had forgotten to remove his gauntlets in his haste. Stripping them both off now, he set them down beside his feet and returned to his task, but after several strokes, he realized it was no good. He'd at least have to remove his fauld. And to do that, he'd need a more stable perch than propped up against the back of a crooked spire. Despite his burning -- and he was nigh volcanic at this point with a pressure yearning to erupt -- Estinien decided to scout out a flatter expanse of roof.

He found one several minutes later, a small flat space wedged between a large chimney, which judging from the rich, savory smells drifting out on its expelled smoke, probably originated in the kitchens -- never doubt the ability of the priesthood to thoroughly _not_ deny themselves the pleasure of the table -- and an ugly, windowless, truncated stump of a tower with a narrow and half-rotted staircase leading to a single wood-planked door.

Estinien quickly shed his gauntlets and fauld and returned to work, sitting down now with his back against the chimney. Grasping his now painfully-engorged length loosely in his fist, he relentlessly pistoned himself with the full motion of his arm, wrist held locked, the inner edge of his forefinger purposely catching that supremely sensitive spot on the underside of his penis where that little, lipped indented crescent of his cockhead came together with his shaft. He moaned, a guttural exhalation he longed to shape into a name to go with that small whisper of a sound the incubus boy had uttered in his arms this afternoon. What had that priest called him? Wicked? Wicked, yes. Made sense -- that was the usual cruelty. "Wicked," Estinien whispered out loud, pistoning himself to his peak. "Wicked," he said a little louder, almost there, so close. "Wicked! Ohhh Wicked!" he moaned, loud and long, as he simultaneously spilled over the edge and his armor.

"Wh-what?" a stuttering, tentative voice answered in the darkness. "I-is...is someone...there?"

Estinien had not the time to be mortified. At the sound of so many words whispered in the same voice as that single burning syllable he had just ridden to ecstasy, his sight went black.


	2. By Any Other Name

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm really sorry that my next chapter of my Nutcracker thing is late. It should be out a little later this week. I kind of had a spectacularly bad mountain bike crash last Wednesday that left me with five broken ribs (four through eight, on my right side) and a partially collapsed lung. Because my chain snapped in half on impact, I even had to walk my bike the half-mile back to my house afterwards. I will NEVER ride without a cell phone again, lol. Anyway, I was in the hospital for a couple days waiting for the lung thing to either resolve or be resolved. Fortunately, I did not need surgery, and now my lung is bruised but not collapsed. Hooray! 
> 
> Anyway, I thought that this chapter is pretty much revised, even if Chapter Six of Starlight Suite isn't. So I thought I'd post it and get it out of my queue. :) Oh, and there's a happy ending to my crash story if you want to read about it in the end notes!!!

Estinien came to awareness choking and sputtering, an iron grip at the nape of his neck tilting his head slightly back as some sort of hot, bitter liquid was forced down his throat.

"Quickly," a voice said, barely audible, a whisper. He felt the familiar burn at the sound of it nonetheless. "Drink. It will help."

He felt like coughing, puking, twisting himself out of that crushing grip, but that seemed an impossible proposition without first doing what the voice asked. So, calming his throat, his heaving lungs, himself, he swallowed. Abruptly, like a candle-flame pinched out between two wetted fingers, the burning sensation that had blazed to life within Estinien at the sound of that strange whispered voice completely abated. He opened his eyes.

"Better?" the voice asked, slightly above a whisper now. Estinien swallowed again, took a deep breath and answered with an affirmative grunt. Without yet moving his head, he let his eyes cast around, trying to make sense of where he was. Inside, that was for certain, though it was nearly as uncomfortably cold and damp as outdoors, he noticed, suddenly feeling chilled now that the intense desire setting his flesh nigh aflame had all but ceased. There was a fire in the room, Estinien saw, but it was banked so low as to cast very little heat or light into the near pitch-black chamber. 

"F-f-forgive me," stuttered the voice again. "Eyes do very little to provide enlightenment in my cell at night. There are no windows, you see...or, rather, don't see, I suppose." The voice, catching now in the most rueful-sounding hitch of amusement at its own wit, made Estinien's gut start to ache with sympathy. "The light of neither moon nor stars can reach us in here," it continued.

Estinien was not remotely fearful, even here in the dark. Somehow, now that he didn't burn for the voice, he instinctively trusted it. "Who  _ are _ you," he asked, reaching out. His hand butted up against the hard, flat, bony surface of what he could only assume was a sternum. The voice hitched hard this time and the body underneath Estinien's fingers flinched away. "Sorry...I'm sorry," he said, not wanting that voice to retreat.

"Something  _ wicked _ , not a 'who' at all... a  _ thing _ ," the voice answered him, dropped to a whisper again.

"Is that what they keep telling you?" asked Estinien, not expecting an answer. "What was that anyway," he continued, changing subjects, "what you gave me to drink?"

"Ah..." he said, "one of the undercooks is kind. She takes pity on me and provides me with this medicinal brew. I...I have...well, with what I am, I have...a-appetites that are difficult to reign in. The tea dampens them," he paused for a moment, "and if it dampens my desires, I've always imagined it might eradicate them entirely in someone of a less vile composition. I've not had an opportunity to test it until now, though. How...how do you feel, Ser Azure?"

"Estinien," the dragoon responded immediately. "None of that 'ser' shite -- not between us. Call me Estinien." Estinien was shocked at how eagerly he sought an intimacy from the other man, and one not even fueled by a sexual burning. Perhaps he had been lonely for a friend for far too long. "I'm fine," he said, remembering to answer the question. He felt the man withdrawing from him. "Wait!" he said, too loud, desperate now to keep him near. "What should I call you," he asked. "I can't rightly call you Wicked. I won't," he said, defiant.

"You shouldn't call me anything at all. You should leave, Ser Estinien, before you're further infected," said the other man. Estinien could hear shuffling now, cloth and metal. He felt cold mythril steel being pressed into his hands -- his fauld, he recognized. "I have the rest too, the gauntlets and helm," said the voice again.

"Oh," answered Estinien, contrite, remembering now precisely  _ why _ he had discarded those pieces of his armor earlier in the evening. Instinctively, he clapped a hand down, feeling for his cock; he was happy to discover it tucked neatly inside his wyvernskin. 

The other man must have heard the hard slap of the dragoon's hand against his own leathers. "I didn't..." the novice started, that hovering, breathy, velvet-smooth voice growing unbearably tight. "Forgive me. I had to make you decent," he continued, "but I didn't... t-t-touch you longer than was necessary, I assure you."

Estinien laughed. "I was moaning for you as I fucked myself into my fist directly outside your door and you're the one apologizing," he asked, again expecting no answer. He heard the other man sharply draw in his breath. "It's fine now, though," said the dragoon, trying to calm him. "The tea  _ worked _ . I assure _ you _ that I no longer wish to swive you into the nearest flat surface."

Now it was the other man's turn to laugh, a genuine one this time, out loud and without a hint of rue. The sound of it sparked the strangest sense of elation inside of Estinien. It filled him, making him giddy and whimsical. Thus, instead of replacing the fauld around his hips, he reached up to his shoulders, released the clasps of his chest plates and  _ removed _ yet another piece of armor. "Come into the light, friend. Come with me, um....Wick!" Estinien near-shouted in his strange newfound joy. "That's what I'll call you -- at least until you're willing to tell me your real name." He paused for a moment, listening, feeling; then he shot out both arms directly in front of him, snatching the other man's hands from the dark. "Come with me, Wick," he said, more softly now, but no less insistent.

"Wait, wait," cried out  _ that voice _ , gasping now at the touch, but suddenly laughing again. "I'll come with you. I will. Just let me get my mask." Reluctantly, Estinien let go of his hands long enough for the novice to fetch his veil and secure it over the lower portion of his face.

"Huh," said the dragoon, turning to leave the room and facing only more darkness. "Where's the door?"

"Ah," he heard as he felt a gloved hand slip inside his own. "This way," Wick said. Estinien allowed himself to be led in the dark.

They stepped out onto the half-rotted staircase, crooked and creaking with their weight, that Estinien had earlier seen leading up to the door of Wick’s ugly, squat toadstool of a tower. "You're kept here like a prisoner?" he asked, aghast, turning now to look at his companion in the sickly yellow glow cast by the scarred and cratered moon above them. 

"'Tis thought best I be kept full away from the others, lest I tempt the flesh," responded the boy from that afternoon, the novice in his robes restored to Estinien's sight in the dull moonlight -- still completely covered, except for, the dragoon noticed, that same scant ilm of flesh on the bridge his nose. 

The familiar prickle pricked for but a scant moment, then calmed as Estinien realized the other man still held his hand clasped tightly in his own, as though desperate to keep a hold of him. Grounded by that firm hand, his eyes slid from the tiny expanse of truly tempting flesh, to fully examine the novice's cloaked face, and though he couldn't see his companion's eyes through the heavy glass and metal goggles, he strongly suspected from the tilt of the slightly shorter man's head as he looked up at Estinien, that Wick was examining him just as intently. 

"I thought those were part of your helm," said the novice, reaching up his free hand to hover the pads of his fingers over the leftmost of the pair of twisted horns that sprouted from either side of Estinien's head.

"Usually they are, but since I was born equipped with my own, the helm was altered so I could simply slip my native appendages through," returned the taller man. 

Truly, no one, least of all his father, knew precisely from where Estinien's slim, elegantly-arched demon horns derived. Alberic could not remember a single mention of such a distinct and distinguished feature among his recorded ancestry. Proper horns they were too, arching back to pin-prick points and coloured a shiny, almost metallic jet black that contrasted strikingly with Estinien's quicksilver hair.

"They're lovely," said Wick, exhaling a sigh that held a touch of longing.

"Go ahead," replied the dragoon. "Touch them. You can; it won't hurt me."

"I mustn't," the novice whispered, but as he had yet to move his hand away, Estinien simply reached up, cupped his own hand over the back of his friend's, and gently pressed Wick's fingers to his horn. The novice trembled, so unused was he to the pleasure of a simple shared touch that he was overwhelmed by having both of his hands in direct contact with the dragoon. Having been taught to revile his own flesh so thoroughly, he was reluctant to foist it on another, yet Estinien seemed to welcome it.

"See," said Estinien, "no harm done. Now," he continued, "I wish to show you something. Here," he brought both of Wick's hands around the back of his neck. "Hold onto me. Hold tight as you can." Feeling the man twine his own hands together against his nape, Estinien bent to scoop the novice's legs out from under him, holding him pressed hard against his own chest. "Ready," he asked the man held close in his arms. Wick nodded. "On 'three' then," Estinien took a breath. "One...Two...Three!" Estinien leapt.

Hurtling up through the air, parting it, all sounds eclipsed but that of the rushing pressure pushing in at his ears, Estinien felt Wick curl himself even closer and tighter around his torso, warmth thrumming through his chest at the clutching, hugging sensation. He made several successive jumps, hopping from one twisting tower to the next, progressively edging higher, until he finally set Wick down on the small parapet encircling the Vault's central spire. "Here," he panted, breathing hard from the exertion. "Look," he said to his newfound friend, gesturing with a sweep of his arm to all of Ishgard spread out beneath them. "It's not exactly beautiful, I suppose," the dragoon continued, speculative, watching now as the heavy, sluggish mists edged higher around them, as though in pursuit. "Still, we're the only ones who can see it," he finished.

"It's o-ours then, this sight -- ours alone. Ours to share," whispered Wick, voice tight and trembling, his arms still clasped around Estinien's neck as he stood pressed close against the taller man. Estinien frowned.

"Are you frightened, Wick," he asked. "Is it the height? I forget that I'm likely the only one accustomed to it."

"No. I'm not afraid," the novice answered, shaking his head slightly. "Truly, I'm not -- not with you here."

The creeping mist, jealous enough of even mouldering Ishgard's turgid views, finally enveloped the pair as they stood on their spire. It dragged the heavy, blowing rains up, seeking to torment, and Estinien wrapped Wick tight in his arms, trying to use his own body to shield the slightly smaller man from their sudden needle-sleet buffeting. A futile endeavor, it seemed, as a fresh blast of ice-strewn wind blew against them so hard it swept Wick's hood back off his head. He gasped and immediately burrowed his face deep into Estinien's shoulder.

Estinien was enchanted. High up in the spires, bone-cold and drenched, his long silver hair dripping slushy rivulets down his back, he stood there, spellbound for a moment, until he raised both hands to slide his fingers through the thick mass of midnight-dark curls that had grown down to cover the nape of Wick's neck in wispy, springing ringlets. "Your hair," he whispered, suddenly reverent, "'tis like the night sky."

"And yours is like the stars," Wick said, suddenly looking his friend straight in the face through his heavy goggles. The wind beat at the veil covering the lower half of his face -- his jaw and chin, his nose and mouth -- granting the most teasing glimpses of all these features, until a sudden, fierce gust-ruffling sent the veil reaching across the small space between their faces, whispering silken bussings against Estinien's lips. Ensorcelled completely now, he felt frozen in a different way, completely unable to move.

"Still, you must not touch it, must not touch me" Wick muttered, breaking his spell after a moment as he belied the force of his own command by gently turning his head side to side against Estinien's touch. Returning his face to the taller man's shoulder, he seemed to relish the way his friend's nails scratched lightly across his scalp. Then he shivered hard suddenly, and as Estinien was uncertain whether it was from his touch or the freezing weather's, he decided to return to Wick's chambers. Scooping the other man close against him, he jumped. Wick didn't even startle in his arms at the abruptness of their descent, just nuzzled his face closer into the dragoon's shoulder and wrapped his arms tighter around his neck, clinging.

Alighting at the foot of Wick's tower and setting his friend down, Estinien waited for several long moments before the novice reluctantly withdrew his arms from around the dragoon's neck and immediately drew his hood back over his own head. Estinien sighed at the loss. Then, noticing how Wick's robes sagged heavy against his body, soaked through and coated with a fine film of sleet, he made to move the smaller man toward his cell. Wick was immovable, frozen in place by more than the rime that coated nigh every surface surrounding them. 

"I can't...I can't go back in there. Not with you," he said, his whole body shaking so hard he appeared to be seizing up.

"You have to. You're freezing," Estinien responded, moving to hook his hand back into his friend's to pull him toward the staircase. Wick continued to resist.

"I'll have to r-remove my robes," he continued.

"'Tis not like either of us will be able to  _ see _ anything," Estinien laughed and bent down to simply hoist the other man over his shoulder.

"Estinien!" Wick cried out in surprise and the dragoon gasped at the thrill he felt from hearing that voice speak his name truly, no "ser" attached.

He creaked up the rotting stairs, Wick wriggling on his shoulder at first, then finally relaxing into the dragoon's hold, submitting to being carried back inside his cell. "Strip," Estinien demanded, once he'd perfunctorily dumped the other man in front of the nearly nonexistent fire in his grate. "I'll wait for you."

"But what about you," Wick asked, voice full of concern. "I know the skins repel rain, but what of your hair? It’s dripping..."

"All over the floor of your cell," Estinien interrupted archly, "how fastidious of you."

"'Twas not what I meant," Wick rejoined, laughing a little as he moved into some far corner of his cell and started to remove his sopping robes. Estinien's sharp ears could discern the squelching of the cloth as it dropped to the stone floor and he realized he was holding his breath, trying to keep the rhythms of his lungs from interfering with his ability to at least  _ hear  _ Wick's body uncovering itself even if he had no hope of seeing it. "I think, perhaps," he said, gasping in air now, somewhat abashed, "I could use some more of that tea of yours."

"Oh," answered Wick, surprise in his voice. "Let me put the kettle on." 

Estinien heard the swishing of dry robes now as his friend moved about further in the chamber, sliding open drawers in what Estinien could only assume was an attempt to locate some desired object.

"We should build this up a little. Where's your kindling?" Estinien asked, moving to poke at the grating with the nearby poker. "Do your keepers mean to freeze you to death?"

"Those of my order are not meant to live in comfort, Estinien, and those of my kind even less so," he sighed, "lest we too easily succumb to pleasures of the flesh once freed from the mortification of it." He paused and sighed again, relenting. "Still, I would not wish that the first guest to which I've ever played host be made uncomfortable. There should be some bundles of sticks to the left of the grating." 

Estinien felt around for them, kneeling before the hearth, until his hand settled upon a paltry pile consisting of no more than five or six slender slivers of wood. He tossed them to the flames, feeling his temper rise. Wick walked over then to kneel beside him, setting the kettle above the meager fire. He turned to face Estinien.

This close to the fire, they could somewhat make out each other's faces; well, Wick could make out Estinien's, and Estinien could at least see his friend's familiar hooded-visage if he had no hope of his seeing his actual face. Settling in, touching knee to knee at first, Wick soon rose to stand on both of his so that he might rub a scratchy wool cloth through the other man's hair, trying to sop up the wet.

"That itches," said the dragoon, wrinkling his nose and laughing. He pushed Wick's hands away and instead shook his hair out like a dog, flinging droplets of cold rain all over the other man.

"Ah, Estinien! Stop that!" he admonished, actually raising that incomparable voice before it dissolved into wheezing, nigh hysterical laughter. "I just changed into my dry things, you...you beast," he continued, employing the now both itchy and wet cloth to wipe the flung droplets from his own glass goggles. Estinien just laughed some more and snatched the cloth away, throwing it down and taking Wick's hands in his own. He was startled to feel bare skin.

"Forgive me," Wick said. "I have no dry gloves... and your hands, they felt so warm even through the cloth. I-I couldn't help but long to truly touch them," he said, voice diminishing, timid. "Forgive my weakness, Estinien," Wick continued, dropping his chin to look down at his lap. "I do not wish to defile thee." He tried to pull his hands back, but Estinien held them tight in his own.

"As if it were possible," he answered, "to defile me with something so innocent as a touch." Estinien did drop one of Wick's hands then, reaching over to cup the novice's chin so that he might raise his head to meet the dragoon's gaze. "Won't you tell me your name, Wick -- your real one? Names are important. They tell us the story of our selves," he continued. "At least that's what my mother believed. And your name, even the one I've given you, writes you askance, I'm afraid. 'Wick' is just as much about catching a candle's flame as 'Wicked' admonished you for your perceived inability to do anything but perpetuate that flame's burning."

"Estinien, I don't..." Wick started, and perceiving it as a refusal, Estinien interrupted.

"Would you like to hear mine?" he asked, clasping both of his friend's hands tight in his own once again and gripping them hard. "My real name? It's Wyrmblood. Estinien Wyrmblood. I was made from the very last Dravanian blood spilled in Ishgard; it still stained my father's skin when I was sired."

"But Estinien...."

"You can tell me, Wick. I would never betray your trust," avowed Estinien, so fierce now that he was bruising his friend's skin in his crushing grip.

"I would tell you anything, my friend," responded Wick, breathing hard, his heart caught in his throat. "Everything. But the truth is I don't have a "real" name, or if I do, I do not know it."

"How is that possible?" asked Estinien, incredulous. "How cruel," he said, almost to himself, tears starting to sting. "But you must have one," the silver-haired man continued. "Everyone born within Ishgard's wall must be named. It's  _ tradition _ . Halone will not recognize those who go unnamed. So says the Enchiridion."

"Perhaps an orphaned incubus defies doctrine," suggested Wick.

"No!" Estinien was adamant, his temper forcing his voice louder than he'd intended. Wick had startled at it, making the dragoon lift the young man's bare skin to his lips, pressing a quick kiss to the back of his left hand. "Pray forgive me, friend. It's just that I  _ know _ this not to be the truth. You  _ must _ have a name. It's just being kept from you for some reason."

"Estinien, you must not let it vex you so," whispered Wick, his skin still tingling from that small peck of a kiss to the back of his hand.

"There's nothing for it," returned the dragoon after a pause of several moments. His brow unfolding as he made his decision. "I will find it out for you, Wick. I will find your name."

"How? Where? What would you do to find such a thing -- if it even exists, Estinien?" asked the other man.

"I vow it!" Estinien said, suddenly fierce. "Take my pledge for it, Wick."

"Your pledge?" the novice asked, trembling at his new-found friend's fervor. 

The kettle screamed, making both men jump and distracting them from the growing intensity of their exchange as Wick hurried to scrape together his tea things and prepare the brew.

"Here, my friend, your tea," he said, finally, pressing the cup and saucer into Estinien's hand. 

The dragoon drank then, slugging down the bitter liquid heedless of how its scorching burned his throat so completely his next words came out rough, the product of a ravaged throat.

"My pledge, then," Estinien croaked out, raspy, reaching down to draw a silver dagger from inside his left sabaton. At the sight of the blade, though the dragoon could not see them, Wick's eyes widened inside his heavy goggles. "Fear not," said Estinien, feeling the other man’s hand, which he had taken up again, start to tighten, to tense. 

"I trust you, Estinien," answered the novice.

Estinien kissed the back of Wick’s hand again before placing the knife in his friend’s palm and urging the incubus to curl his fingers around the hilt. He reached up to his own still-wet hair, moving deft fingers to swiftly separate and plait a small section drawn from behind his tapered ear. Firelight glittered on the blade, then, as the fiend placed his own hand around the one in which his friend held the knife, guiding Wick to shear through his plait, snick-snak, leaving it loose in Estinien’s hands.

"Here," he said to Wick, taking up his left hand and winding the long silver plait 'round and around the novice's slender wrist. "Keep it, Wick, as my pledge that I will give you back your name." 

Wick trembled. “Wait, Estinien," he said softly, timid. "Isn't it customary to seal a pledge with an exchange?" 

"You would allow me..." Estinien started, his voice overcome with wonder.

"I would," answered the other man.

Estinien reached up, his own hands shaking now, to sweep the hood back from Wick's head, exposing his still-damp, night-dark curls. Drawing the tip of his knife down to the other's man's nape, he removed a single soft ringlet. His friend shook in earnest then, feeling the other man's slender fingers gently caress the back of his neck. 

The dragoon placed the curl to his lips. "I will treasure this," he whispered. "And I promise you..." Estinien continued, bending close to kiss that small bit of exposed flesh that sat high on the bridge of the novice's nose. "I promise you,Wick, my first and my only friend, I will find your name. I will find it and return it to you."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok, folks may have noticed that I have a bike for my little picture thing. That bike is not just any bike, but the best bike ever, the perfect bike, the bike I have been wanting for the last two years. It is a Surly Wednesday (yes, named for Wednesday Adams), the ultimate chromoly steel, 4.6 inch tire, one quiver fat bike! They are not easy to come by, particularly not this year, when only 32 x-small frame Wednesdays were due in the U.S. by December -- thirty-two for the whole country! Well, the very day I came home from the hospital, my local bike shop called to say that even though they are a tiny shop and not a preferred Surly dealer, they were, somehow, being allocated a Wednesday, and since my order was already in, that one Wednesday is MINE!!! So come Christmas/my birthday, which is about when I'll be allowed back on a mountain bike anyway, I will finally have that bike that's my picture thing, though for some reason it's like this weird acid grape soda colour now. I don't care; it will still be mine!!!


	3. What Happened in the Feylands

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Haurchefant flees to the Feylands, where he meets the Fey King.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has blood and gore. 
> 
> I had quite a bit of difficulty with Haurchefant -- so much so, that I finished writing the next chapter of this story and I’m half-way through chapter 14 of my ballet thing, and I’m only just now posting this poor neglected chapter that’s been finished for weeks. I do apologize if I got Haurchefant wrong; he’s just such a good guy, I really wanted to try and do him justice here.

The forest spread out in long lines of mist-covered, moss-covered, black-barked trees, trees which were unfamiliar, which collected shadows around their reaching branches and in tiny pools of darkness amidst their twisting, tripping roots. And he was increasingly convinced, as he ran this way and that, directionless and desperate, that they looked upon him with a distinct malice. He bore no axe, couldn’t conceive of even making a dent in those massive, iron-hard trunks if he had one, so he was uncertain why the forest thought him enough of a threat to persist in its menacing.

Maybe even the trees, rootbound as they were and incapable of the choices he’d made in the last twenty-four bells, realized he was in flight, took note of his refugee status and resented him for it. Haurchefant paused at the thought. He looked down at himself, still clad in his heavy House Fortemps chainmail, over which his father had drawn an equally cumbersome beaver-skin cloak at their separation. It was an expensive garment, difficult to procure, one of the few outer layers that could guard against Ishgard’s mouldering wet. It was also the Count’s very own; he’d drawn it from his own shoulders before he’d wrapped it around his son’s.

“Father, no,” the young man had said, resisting the gesture. “The damp. It makes your weak side ache.”

“I can remain indoors, Haurchefant,” replied his father. “That is no longer an option for you. And I’ve heard the Twelveswood named Rain’s Forest enough by Fey who knew to be wary of its mists, your mother among them, to allow you passage into the Feylands without the proper coverings,” Edmont continued.

“My mother,” the young man repeated, looking down at the rain-slicked flagstones. He missed her. Too delicate to long survive both Ishgard’s grueling monotony of climate and the late Countess’s scalding ire, she had returned to her homeland long ago, abandoning the boy before he’d reached his teens. Fortunately his father was a kindhearted man, a man who regarded his illegitimate child with the same tenderness as he did his trueborn heirs. 

“Perhaps you will find her,” his father reminded him, “if she still lives.” The longing in his father’s voice at the mere thought of his former lover, his only beloved, was palpable, as was the fear that she might, in fact, no longer be among the living.

“Perhaps,” agreed Haurchefant, “though I am less than certain about the desirability of such a reunion. She did abandon me.”

“Be certain indeed, my child, in your knowledge that she had no choice,” the Count replied, shaking his head. “And be  _ more _ than certain in your knowledge that you can no longer remain in Ishgard. You are not safe here.”

Haurchefant  _ was _ certain. He knew what his father meant: what was supposed to have been an honor -- his nomination to the Heavensward as a replacement to a retired knight -- guaranteed his immediate exile. Haurchefant knew. He had known when he had taken his final leave of his father, regretting every one of the tears the Count had tried to surreptitiously wipe from his eyes, and he knew now, as he lost more and more of himself with every blasted moment he spent within this writhing, circling horror of a forest. The last twenty-four bells had made even Lord Haurchefant Greystone, the perpetually insouciant, forget how to smile, how to laugh.

So he continued to sprint forward, hoping to outrun the face-whipping branches and limb-twisting roots before their shadows wormed in through his ears and made him forget who he was when he’d begun his flight from Ishgard. Up ahead there...was that a patch of yellow light ... a shine cast by a sun whose face was not the pallid chalk complexion of Ishgard’s sick star? As like was drawn to like, Haurchefant ran toward the golden yellow glow, delighting so in the possibility of warmth that he completely abandoned any pretense of caution. When his step fell within fulms of the light, he suddenly found himself in the distinctly vertiginous position of rising through the air feet first -- and with an alacrity he could not have matched had those same feet been firmly positioned on the ground. A stout bough seemed to accelerate toward him, filling his narrowing frame of vision before it struck him with force enough to winnow that frame still further, knocking him into oblivion.

The smell struck him with more force, on his return to consciousness, than the bough that had knocked him to dark. What a stench! Rotting flesh, for certain, thickening blood, oozing viscera -- it was the smell of death in its various stages of decay. Haurchefant opened his eyes tentatively. His dread was equal to the sight that met him. Pieces of carcasses were scattered all about him, mostly torn-out columns of vertebrae, bleeding tissue still clinging to the bones, and dismembered limbs tossed randomly across the dirt -- hands that could no longer clutch, feet that could no longer run. They seemed to be culled from all manner of different creatures, from what Haurchfant could observe, and he seemed to be poised to join them if the heavy, rusting shackle binding his left wrist to a chain sunk deep into the rock face upon which he was leaning was any indication.

Feeling life rush into his sluggish limbs with the wave of adrenaline that crested over his wakening senses, urging him to react, Haurchefant stood up too quickly, his full weight tugging his wrist painfully against the shackle as dizziness struck and he sank back to the ground. That was when he realized, as his bare ass sunk into soft earth, that he was buck naked. Oh no, he thought to himself, a more urgent panic rising in his throat than the one that had gripped him upon recognition of his imprisonment. He heard the flicker before he felt himself rise from the ground. Well, he thought, at least he was head-first this time. 

Haurchefant had always despaired of controlling them, his diaphanous, lace-veined fey wings, a legacy of his mother attached firmly to the inside of each shoulder blade but completely unresponsive to his command. They had a mind of their own. His father’s answer to his unusual predicament was to bind them beneath many layers of clothing, Haurchefant’s early ascension to knighthood after his rescue of little Lord Francel Haillenarte being particularly fortuitous in this regard because it allowed him to wear heavy House Fortemps chainmail, especially effective in pinning down his unfortunate appendages.

And unfortunate they were, because while demi-fiends were generally accepted in Ishgard -- the current Azure Dragoon, Estinien Wyrmblood, was the product of a fey/fiend coupling after all -- fey wings on a male fiend made the man in possession of such unusual encumbrances nearly as poorly regarded as an incubus in the eyes of Ishgardian orthodoxy. Only female fey were in possession of such wings; even in the Feylands themselves, men who confounded such expectations were suspect. In Ishgard they were an abomination, an abnegation of custom and tradition, and, as such, intolerable. 

Otherwise, as he presented himself to the world, Haurchefant was the ideal fiend, tall and imposing with moon-pale skin and the bone-coloured nubs of satyr-like horns protruding from either side of his skull. But the wings, the wings! When Haurchefant had been nominated for elevation into the Heavensward, the Archbishop’s personal guard, he knew he could no longer preserve his careful facade. Living in such close quarters with the other knights would expose him.

So he had fled, and thus found himself in his current predicament.

“Thou art surely in a befuddlement, friend,” he heard a raw, rasping voice say over his left shoulder. Turning his head to try and look, he saw only the shimmer of his own moving wing.

“Who’s there?” he inquired, finding his voice. “Help me, please!” he entreated.

“Aye, as best we can,” was the reply. “What say thee, brother?”

“Aye, aye, as best we can, as thou sayest, but it is surely a befuddlement -- a real poser,” answered a similar-sounding voice from over his opposite shoulder. As Haurchefant stopped straining to see behind him, which had only resulted, after all, in being reminded how his control over his free movement was impeded in ways that had nothing to do with the chain still binding him to the earth like a weighted string holds a kite, he turned forward to see two pair of a very different kind of wings. 

They had feathers for one, black feathers. And they were attached to the strangest pair of rooks upon which Haurchefant had ever laid eyes. Clothed in cumbersome leather boots that looked weighty enough to impede flight, eyeglasses that magnified the two pairs of bright black eyes behind them, and matching tartan mufflers wound and wound three times around their necks, the pair of what he was fairly certain were, in fact, birds, were more appropriately dressed than he was currently. And somehow these various sartorial accoutrements seemed more shocking to Haurchefant than the fact that rooks were currently engaging him in conversation, an indication, of course, that they were capable of speech. Rooks did not talk in Ishgard. That would have been entirely unacceptable.

As the two rooks hovered around his bound arm, inspecting the shackle and chain more fully -- as they flapped and bobbed back up to face him, landing finally, side by side, on his forearm -- a low thrumming rumble echoed from the depths of the forest. Both rooks snapped to full attention where they’d settled and looked in the direction from which the new threat sounded.

“Must be quick now. Aye, brother?” asked the rook closest to the man.

“Aye, aye, brother. The time hath run itself out,” the other replied.

“What’s that noise,” Haurchefant asked, growing more alarmed as, not only did the rumble sound again, but the interval between it and subsequent rumbles lessened until it became obvious that a percussive rhythm was being established. Someone was playing a drum. And that someone was drawing closer.

“The Court arrives before him. Aye, brother?” asked the first rook again.

“Aye, aye, brother. The scabrous ones come first. Must fetch help, methinks,” the perennially second rook replied.

“We will return for thee,” the first rook continued, turning back to face Haurchefant, his eyes comically magnified behind his round lenses. “The King must not find us here -- nor any of his Court.”

Haurchefant opened his mouth to plead with them to stay, to help him somehow. He was desperate and terribly frightened, of course, feelings only heightened by his inability to maintain agency over his own actions, his inability to literally ground himself, to plant his two bare feet firmly in the soft earth, but a sudden sense of calm washed over him. He would remain himself even at his end. Lord Haurchefant Greystone was a proud knight of House de Fortemps and, as such, was in the service of all those in need. 

“You must hasten yourselves away then, my new friends,” he said, a smile spreading out over his features as he remembered himself. “I have plenty of experience with nobility, and believe myself equal to treating with even a King,” he continued, raising his chin in defiance of his own terror.

“He’s a brave one, then. Aye, brother?” the first rook asked the second.

“Aye, aye, brother. He’s no craven, for certain!” returned the second.

“The Fey King will test thee, child. He will test thy courage. But I believe thou wilt survive him,” said the first rook, bobbing his head rapidly. “I believe thou wilt. We’re off to find her who may help thee.”

“Fly then, friends,” Haurchefant responded, his voice without a hint of a quaver even as the drum beats increased in volume and pace, urging a rapid march forward...a rapid march forward to him, Haurchefant thought as he watched the rooks depart in a flurry of flapping black feathers.  _ He _ was this phantasmal drummer’s destination,  _ him _ in this pit of festering corpse bits.

The “scabrous ones” was a good description of the Fey King’s most forward arrivals, Haurchefant thought to himself as a trio of wart-ridden creatures hopped into sight. Their slick dull-green skin was such a proliferation of bumps upon lumps that it was nigh impossible to make out their facial features, difficult even to pick out their eyes from the profusion of bubbling tissue that covered what he supposed were their faces. Hopping in single-file seemed to be their sole method of forward locomotion, with the creature left at the back continually leap-frogging o’er his two compatriots to make himself a new leader, and the new back-end repeating the process (and so forth and so on), each creature’s relative position in the line continually shuffling. For all its strangeness, however, their frog-jumping progression was genuinely rapid. They must have been well-practiced in it, Haurchefant surmised.

“Greetings, Noble Lords in the service of the King,” said the man, the steadiness of his voice and his broad smile belying not only his terror, but his instinctual disgust at their appearance and his continual frustration with his incorrigible wings. The creatures responded only by gathering in a semi-circle underneath him, making a strange gurgling sound deep in their throats, and suddenly thrusting out from widening cracks in each of their lumpy faces identical elastic tongues that stuck to his feet and ankles, preparing to draw him down to earth.

For once Haurchefant was grateful for his stubborn-minded wings. They flickered and flit, exerting a strength the man was not yet aware they possessed, in an attempt to keep him airborne. “Ah, I see you desire a more intimate acquaintance, your Lordships,” he quipped, maintaining his appearance of calm equanimity even as his body became the focus of a ragged tug-of-war between sticky, stretching tongues and his own beating wings. 

It seemed the lumpy creatures were content to toy with him as they waited, flicking out their tongues and hopping in place at random intervals while the drumming continued to draw nearer. But there was something else now, Haurchefant thought, something underneath. It was a different, more disturbing sound, like a swarming’s chittering or a snake nest’s cacophony of warning rattles, a nature sound made somehow grotesque in its amplification. He had never had his stomach turn at a  _ sound _ before, but the captive man felt as though he might suddenly let loose its contents. Would serve the trio of the snatching tongues right if he puked his guts all over the piles of warts that made up their heads, he continued to muse to himself -- himself being the only one with whom he could muse at the moment, as his current company seemed rather averse to conversation. 

Swallowing hard, trying to keep his guts’ contents where they belonged, Haurchefant’s nose twitched of its own accord. It had become aware, before even the man himself, of a stench that far outstripped that to which he had awoken on the ground. There was a new arrival on the way, his nose informed him, an arrival that brought with it the stench of living decay, of organs rotting out inside an organism still breathing. This smell of promised death, of necrotic blood still flowing sluggish through the veins, proved even more noxious than the assortment of decomposing pieces over which Haurchefant was suspended. As it drew close, he finally lost the battle with his mounting nausea, emptying his stomach into the air beneath him. 

The toad-like creatures dispersed then, spattered as they were with sick, and seeming, despite Haurchefant’s inability to read whatever features they possessed amidst the warty terrain of their respective faces, somewhat cowed by whatever it was that sent that ambassadorial stench ahead of it, announcing its imminent arrival. Within moments he could see what caused their distress, as a monstrosity of which he had never  _ dreamed  _ \-- and he was a creature bred, born and raised in the Fiendfell, mind you -- ambled into the clearing in which he was imprisoned. But that was the point, Lord Haurchefant thought to himself, his mind narrowing to a moment of icy rationality in his terror: dreams were always worse than dread -- what one imagines when one’s conscience is clear is far more gruesome than what a guilt-ridden soul allows itself to imagine as a possible ultimate fate. He was trapped in a nightmare far worse than any hell.

Surprised by how quickly the shambling mound of muscle and fur could move, Haurchefant could do little to react before the creature was upon him, his fey wings struggling with such might against his chain now, in their apparent desperation to get him away from the newcomer, that he was afraid his left hand might be torn from his arm. Their mad struggle was to no avail, however, as the creature was large enough when it rose upon hind legs, stretching its body, accordion-like, that its massive head drew even with Haurchefant’s face. It roared then, unhinging its jaw like a shark so that its face was no more than a gaping black abyss circled with a ring of toothy daggers, a sprawling maw that spewed death-scented slobber into his hair, his eyes, all over his bare-skinned body, coating even his still-madly fluttering wings with the smell of living rot. It was too much for Haurchefant. Stunned, he started his fall to earth.

He was caught before he hit the ground.

“Enough, Antigonus,” said a voice so deep it was hardly a voice at all, more like a murmuring floating in on the ubiquitous mists, sinking directly through his skull to communicate a reverberating message from the forest’s dark heart. The voice commanded silence, and so it was. Haurchefant’s monstrous tormentor reluctantly removed its bulk from his murky frame of vision and he noticed, additionally, as his senses began to clear, that the drumming had completely ceased. Lord Haurchefant Greystone was in the presence of a King. 

“A fine tribute, a pretty thing,” said the voice again. “Who caught him? Who chained him here?”

“‘Twas I,” said another, higher-pitched voice, one that spoke of dead leaves skittering across the forest floor on a stormy night.

“Fine then, fine,” replied the voice. 

Haurchefant focused hard then, forcing himself to look directly at his captor: he was like a tree himself, tall as one at least, and thick around as one of the black-barked trunks that crowded ‘round the glade, peering in. Possessing the muscled torso of a man, covered all over in a fine, moss-like coating of brown fur, the Fey King turned beast-like past his waist, his body terminating in the powerful hoofed legs of a buck. But his unusual lower appendages were hardly his most fantastic feature. 

If one chose, in one’s perusal of the King, to progress back up his body, as Haurchefant did now, one would notice the thickening of his fine chest fur as it progressed up his neck and face. Indeed, he had nearly a mane of shaggy, matted hair creeping up the back of his neck onto his skull. And that skull! That skull! Upon that heavy-browed but still eerily man-shaped skull, sprung the soft, petal-shaped ears of a deer, above which, protruding from either side of his cranium, were the most magnificent rack of antlers to have ever been bestowed upon any living creature. How many points? It was impossible to tell; as Haurchefant started to count, his gaze was drawn in by further points, by points upon points, sprouting from each other like the supple new branches that grew from off-shoots of off-shoots of mighty main limbs. And they spun and curled upon themselves, these antlers, seeming to rearrange their twisting, snake-like composition before the captive man’s gaze. The sight made his still swimming head sink deeper in the murk, so Haurchefant closed his eyes.

“Am I too much for thy sight to bear, pretty little one?” the King asked him directly, his voice now rumbling through his prisoner’s skull in much the same way as had his processional drumming. The King chuffed a low noise in his throat, what Haurchefant could only assume was a sign of his amusement -- a supposition that was supported by the sudden renewal of that disturbing chittering that had earlier tittered just underneath his drum’s thrumming pulse. Curious, the captive knight opened his eyes again; he wished to see the source of that sound.

Scattered around and behind the Fey King were numerous smaller copies of himself, presumably fey of the King’s own kind. Their antlers were less magnificent, the hair covering their bodies and faces more thickly matted and encrusted with drying earth, dead leaves and other debris from the forest’s floor, but they were undoubtedly of the same tribe as their King. And a strange tribe indeed they were at the moment, all holding their sides, shaking their heads and stamping their hoofs into the ground; apparently the chittering was a sound of their mirth. Either they were a group of well-practiced sycophants, or their King had said something genuinely funny. Haurchefant gathered what wits remained to him. If the King was in a pleasant enough mood to make jokes, perhaps now was the time to engage him.

“Your Majesty,” he said, trying to affect an approximation of the formal bow that was the traditional show of deference in Ishgard. It was not easy while lying prone in the palm of a large brown hand. “Please allow me to formally introduce myself,” Haurchefant continued, growing a smidge bolder at the slight nod of the King’s chin. “I am Lord Haurchefant Greystone of the Holy See of Ishgard in the Fiendfell. Through no fault other than the accident of my birth, I have been forced to flee my homeland, seeking succor amongst my mother’s people here in the Feylands.”

“Thy mother’s people?” the Fey King asked amidst another chorus of chittering laughter from his followers. “Ah, that explains it. Why thou wouldst trespass on Our lands, a refugee from Hell.”

“I intended no disrespect, Your Majesty, but only to seek solace. I did not wish to provoke your displeasure by my trespass,” Haurchefant responded, lowering his eyes in deference. 

“But trespass thou didst, into the heart of my most sacred grove, and for thy transgression, thou must pay, pretty one,” the King decreed, prodding now at Haurchefant’s body with broad, square-tipped fingers, lines of black dirt crusted beneath his yellowed nails. “Unusual child,” he continued, nudging aside his prisoner’s bare cock in order to confirm the sack pulled tight up against his body in reaction to the wet cold. Haurchefant dared to look up at his captor then, his stark vulnerability urging him to discern the King’s intent. “These parts,” said the Fey King, poking his captive’s genitals again, “are not of one piece with thy fairy wings, boy.” 

“I fear they are not,” agreed Haurchefant, trying to keep his voice steady as he dared to look directly in the eyes of his tormentor. He was lost, then, for the moment, lost within the landscape of alien intent in the forest reflected on the surface of its mighty ruler’s eyes. There was nothing deeper, Haurchefant realized with a growing sense of his peril, nothing empathetic or kindly, or even furious within. The Fey King was nothing but his Forest, and his Forest was neither angry nor compassionate; the Forest just was. 

“I rarely have access to that which so whets the appetite -- the wings of My Lady attached to what lies not under her sworn protection. Thou art a fine dainty, a tidbit, my lad!” the Fey King proclaimed, his voice growing louder, buzzing more intently inside his captive’s skull. With that, as a sadistic-minded child might work upon a captured fly, the King tore Haurchefant’s wings from his body. Thus disembodied, they flit and flickered still, struggling where he pinched them between his forefinger and thumb, before he tilted back that massive, antler-crowned skull, opened his mouth and crunched them down with blunted ochre-stained teeth; he swallowed with a sigh of satisfaction. “Enough,” he said, tossing Haurchefant’s body to the ground amidst the remains of prior tributes. “Let us return to the hunt!” the Fey King decreed, turning back toward his Forest, his retinue following in his train. 

Dimly, as his sight floated toward darkness again, Haurchefant turned his head to see his own blood flooding into a widening pool underneath him, a growing body of blood redefining its banks by the second as it lapped at the disparate pieces of broken flesh piled where he too had been discarded. Feeling surprisingly detached in what he assumed were his last few moments of consciousness, he watched as the flow then receded, as the bed of his streaming life dried up, sinking into the softening earth, turning brown mud red.

He awoke to a different smell, gradually coming to the rest of his senses through an awareness of scent upon which he’d come to rely more and more since he’d left behind Ishgard and it’s pervasive odor of mildew. Not all the smells had been good ones, he thought idly to himself, but at least they were different. This one, though, the one that flooded through him now, it was very good indeed -- a stew, something warm and rich, something with onions. Haurchefant snapped open his eyes. He saw a ceiling with exposed wooden beams sunk deep in what looked to be mud.

Mud. Brown mud turning to red and the stench of corpses -- corpses among which he should have been numbered by now. Where was he?

“Awake is he? Aye, brother?” a familiar voice croaked near him. 

“Aye, aye, brother. Awake he is,” another voice answered.

Haurchefant turned his head and looked into a pair of bright bead-like eyes swimming large behind a pair of round, wire-rimmed spectacles. “My friends,” he said to the pair of booted and mufflered rooks he’d encountered before his disastrous altercation with the King of the Forest. His voice wheezed out of him, barely able to rise above a whisper, yet he found himself too exhausted to say more.

“Rest thyself, lad. We brought her who could help thee. Aye, brother?” said the first rook to the second.

“Aye, aye, brother, and none too soon,” replied the second.

“Enough. The pair of you should know better than to tire him with your magpie chatter,” Haurchefant heard another voice say, a deep but distinctly feminine voice.

“Aye, Bloom,” answered the first rook, turning himself on his large boots, the top of his too-spindly legs peeking out their tops, to point in the direction from which the voice issued.

“Aye, aye, My Lady,” the other rook said, flapping his wings and letting out what Haurchefant assumed was an affirmative caw. Both birds took flight then, hopping onto a gnarled branch of a perch that seemed to grow straight out of the wall itself, if the invalid man’s sight was to be trusted. But that couldn’t be right, he thought to himself. Tree branches don’t sprout themselves from the walls of houses, and besides, how could his corvidae friends grasp their perch with shod feet? He must be mistaken; it was all shadows in that corner anyway.

“‘Tis a clever tree,” the woman’s voice said, seeming to speak directly to Haurchefant’s unvoiced thoughts. “It grows what’s needed,” she continued.

“My Lady,” he croaked, the words costing more physical effort than he would have thought possible. Haurchefant tried to shift something more than his head then, making a movement to try and lift his shoulders that ended with an agonizing throb of pain in his back -- one that repeated itself with every beat of his quickening heart. He cried out then, tears forced from the corners of his eyes.

“Lie still!” came the command from the feminine voice, as the woman herself came into view. 

In Ishgard, Haurchefant had lived amidst a narrow range of Fiendkind, though he knew from expeditions elsewhere in the ‘Fell that demons were as various as the dread that birthed them. Still, he had never been in such close proximity to any but the tall, sickly-pale elf-men, ears pointing straight out the sides of their heads like daggers, among which he numbered himself. Only the slightest traces betrayed his kind as fiendish at all, a forked tail here, a serpent’s tongue there, nub-like horns protruding from brows, like Haurchefant’s own, the occasional slit-thin horizontal pupils of a goat. There were the fey/fiend half-breeds like himself, of course, who sometimes exhibited more unusual traits, Estinien Wyrmblood’s slim, jet-black antelope horns, for instance. And there were his wings -- there  _ were _ his wings, past tense -- he remembered with an unexpected pang of sadness. Still, he’d never been in the presence of a creature like the woman who stood before him now.

She was tall, taller than him by at least a couple ilms, and had the darkest skin he’d ever seen -- darker far than Ishgard’s wan, cloud-crowded night skies; but both her hair and her eyes were light-coloured, like clear ice flashing crystal and silver in the dimly lit room. And if that contrasting composition of features were not enough to mark her as unusually striking, a pair of curving demon horns, thicker and longer than the Azure Dragoon’s, arched back from either side of her skull, skimming the ceiling beams of the room in which she was standing. Again, he couldn’t be certain, but he had a distinct impression that the ceiling moved with her, pulling itself up where she stood to allow her the necessary space to move about the room without scraping her horns on the beam-supported earth above.

Haurchefant found that he could not keep himself from staring, he found her so beautiful -- strange, indeed, but so very beautiful. “Who...are you?” he managed to force out before his breath grew short again, before his eyes grew tired from keeping them open long enough to fully satisfy his desire to continue  _ seeing _ this vision of a woman by his side.

“Quiet now,” she answered, pulling a stool up to his bedside, sitting down upon it and taking his hand within both of her own. He noticed her skin was pleasantly cool to the touch. “My name is Bloom, if that gives you any comfort, Bloom Rising. And since I doubt you’re the type to keep silent and rest yourself while your curiosity is piqued, I will confirm your suspicion that, like you, I am a demi -- half-fiend, half-fey. An ogryss, if you must know, on my mother’s side. Ogres are fey, not fiends, despite what some tales would have you believe,” she told him matter-of-factly, gently letting go of his hand. “Is that enough for you then? Enough for now?” Haurchefant nodded as best he could. “Fine then. Rest yourself. Your dinner will soon be ready,” she continued.

“I..I…” he started, groping for her and trying again to hoist himself upwards. For his efforts, he earned himself the same throbbing pain he’d experienced previously and a concerned furrowing of his host’s brows.

“Now, now,” she said in a mildly berating tone. “I thought I told you to rest. If you stir yourself so, you’ll get no more stories from me,” she said, taking up his hand again to pat it reassuringly, before gently placing it over his heart and standing. “Rest now. I promise more answers, Lord Haurchefant, after you take some food.”

“Just, Haurche…” he tried.

“Ah!” she raised a finger and pressed it across his lips to close them. His eyes widened at her touch and he felt, despite the pain and confusion and murkiness in his head, the sudden desire to kiss the slender finger stopping up his mouth. Her eyes mirrored his own, opening large for the briefest of moments, as though sensing his intentions, before she drew back her arm and looked down. “Haurchefant, then, just as you wish,” she said, turning to stand without looking back at him.

He closed his eyes then -- her absence from his sight providing him with no reason to persevere in keeping them open -- and he must have slept in that time, dreaming of silver eyes and full, night-dark lips set in a habitually neutral expression. In his dreams, he saw himself easing those lips into the curve of a smile, and the thought made him smile himself.

“Haurchefant,” he heard her call him from his sleep, struggling to rouse himself to meet her. “Your dinner is ready. Allow me to help you sit?” she asked, moving close to him again.

“Please,” he answered, his voice coming more easily to him now. She bent her body close to his then, blanketing him in her warmth and gently slipping an arm underneath the upper part of his shoulders, careful to avoid his still-seeping wounds. “I’ll have to change your dressings after you eat,” she informed him, holding him so his face was, by necessity, pressed lightly against her chest as she shifted the pillows behind him with her free hand, adjusting them so that she could prop him in a seated position. “Better?” she asked, lying him back against the soft, feather-down pillows. “‘Tis not swansdown, nothing so luxurious. The feathers come from our erstwhile friends over there,” she said, gesturing toward the still-perched rooks, who were bobbing their heads up and down in enthusiastic agreement. She laughed then, a sharp little bark of a laugh, cut-off quickly, as though she were reluctant to make the sound.

Haurchefant smiled in earnest, then, smiled hard and wide, smiled almost giddily as Bloom lifted a spoon from the bowl to his smiling mouth. He had found his purpose now -- his new purpose, he thought to himself, post-Ishgard, post-flight, post even his once-hated wings: he would live now solely to hear that laugh again, to hear it and to know that  _ he _ was its source, the one to kindle such lightness and joy inside this beautiful, taciturn woman that she would be unable to bridle it, would have to let it ring out without hesitation. Why should such a lovely creature, his savior and nursemaid, be so tentative in her expression of mirth, he wondered as he slurped up the contents of another proffered spoonful. Perhaps she’d had little about which to be merry. Well, he would change that; see if he wouldn’t!

“‘Tis delicious,” he said of the meaty broth, suffused as it was with the flavours of venison, onion and aromatic sage.

“Nourishing, at least,” Bloom replied. “Sustaining. You’ve lost so very much blood, I’m astonished at your ability to maintain consciousness. It will be a long recovery, Lord Haurchefant...Haurchefant, I mean,” she said, recovering herself before he could move to correct her. As she steered another spoonful of broth toward his still-grinning mouth, he noticed that she was avoiding looking at him directly, as though the familiarity of his name divested of its title embarrassed her somehow. “Only continued rest and nourishment will return you to strength,” she began again, still skirting his direct gaze.

“I could not possibly impose upon your hospitality for a moment longer than it is required to set me back upon my feet,” he returned, the courtesy instilled in him by his education and upbringing finding voice as he tried to engage her again -- tried to get her to look at him at least. 

“Even such a seemingly modest goal will likely take a moon,” she replied. “But put yourself at ease; I am the Keeper of those who find themselves subject to the Forest’s lack of mercy -- who find themselves subject to it and yet manage to live,” she said with a firm nod of her chin before raising her eyes and giving him exactly what he’d wanted. 

Lord Haurchefant stared into eyes like silver scales flashing as tiny minnows darted to avoid his net when he’d waded, as a child, in the murky pond near Camp Dragonhead, his household’s ancestral keep. He shivered.

Bloom noticed. “Your armor,” she said,” and your cloak. We retrieved them from a stack of...discarded things.”

He looked down upon his own body then, conscious for the first time since his initial return to wakefulness that his chest was bare but for the bandages wrapped tightly around the upper half of his torso. Looking further down into his quilt-covered lap, he realized that he was naked underneath, as naked as he’d been during his audience with the King.

“I have some trousers that might serve you,” Bloom said in a hushed voice, “but I’ll admit ‘tis easier this way -- easier to care for your wounds and to bathe you.”

Haurchefant, despite having been in possession of a reputation in Ishgard that surely precluded bashfulness, found himself blushing to think of what she had seen while he had yet remained unconscious. It was a strange sensation for him; he had never before been shy about his body. Accepting several more spoonfuls of broth in a silence he found unusual but not uncomfortable, the injured man grew thoughtful. Used to being the primary point of contention between his father and the Countess de Fortemps, he typically longed to smooth over discomfiture by filling pauses in conversation with his own voice, his own desire to prompt mirth in others, even if it be at his own expense. Yet, he did not feel  _ compelled _ to engage his hostess here, as though it were a necessary thing. He simply _ wanted _ to make her smile.

“I’m certain ‘tis nothing you haven’t seen before,” he managed between spoonfuls, gesturing toward his blanket-covered body.

“Yes,” she quietly agreed, but faltered with her spoon for a moment, setting it back in the bowl and looking down at her lap. 

He reached out to her then, placing his hand over hers and squeezing gently. Then he smiled yet again; even while her head was still bowed and she could not see him, he smiled at her. He smiled even wider than before, the feelings he tried to communicate with the simple expression rising from his belly, from his chest: be my friend, the smile said; let  _ me _ be your light; and, as ever with one of Haurchefant’s smiles, love me. Love me, his smile pleaded -- please, _ please _ , just love me!

She lifted her head then, perhaps sensing his warmth, noticed how he sat there beaming at her, and, strangely, considering she was not a woman given easily to joy -- she’d had few enough reasons to experience such a sensation -- Bloom Rising allowed herself to smile back.


	4. The Doctrine of the Eyes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Estinien pays his only friend a visit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not certain if this is NSFW or not. There's nothing particularly explicit, but, just to be safe, it's probably best not read at work.  
> My husband said the first part was a little bit gross, so, umm, maybe it's a little bit gross.

He was hungry. Again. But that was nearly always the case now, his appetite steadily growing with each sunrise, each bell, each minute. Curse the Arch-Fiend and his promises! Power he had wrung from them, power and pleasure, including a single act of pleasure, Summers ago, that had been so exquisitely fulfilling he had found no further need for the act and subsequently cast off, as best he could, all reminders of it. Almost all, at least. 

Hungry, hungry, always this aching emptiness in his gut, in his center, prodding him out of his morning’s torpor and into sluggish action. Stretching up and up and up, he rose out of his seat, so much taller than he used to be -- and thin, so very thin and insubstantial, the colour and stuff of shadow was a body that had once been flesh, and it looked like one too; he was like a shadow projected on a wall, proportions shaped into a skeletal mannerist grotesque by a head-on facing light.

And he was hungry! Where were his knights -- his attendants? Where was Ser Vaindreau? Ah yes, that’s right. He had forgotten. He himself had consumed the Very Reverend Archimandrite of the Heavens’ Ward not a fortnight past. The boy had taken his place, the small, pale one with green eyes and an oversized sword. He remembered now. Well where was he then? Not only was he hungry, but Thordan VII, Archbishop of Ishgard’s Holy See in Hell, needed to be sewn back into flesh.  _ His  _ flesh once, that he’d burst through at the scalp and split in half, snake-like, when his devourings had spurred a metamorphosis from a thing created out of mere dread to the thing that birthed it. The Archbishop was well on his way to becoming a fiend of some consideration, a thing that could leak out beyond the boundaries of these Hells, out of all these realms that lived in-between, and affect more substantial worlds, those that held more of a claim on reality by virtue of being able to create it.

But where was that boy? What could be keeping him? He was hungry! He was Archbishop Thordan VII and he _ should not  _ be kept waiting! Well… he must ring for him, he supposed. 

“Your Holiness?” the boy stuttered out, responding within minutes to the call of the Archbishop’s bell. “How might I serve you, your Eminence?”

Thordan liked the quaver in the young man’s voice, liked the way his hands trembled as he attempted to make his formal bow, his natural grace made clumsy by obvious terror. How delicious, Thordan thought to himself. Terror was such a treat! He devoured it too quickly, as he always did these days. What a glutton he had become, the Archbishop mused, but his self-chiding held more pride than admonishment.

“How are you with a needle and thread, boy?” he asked, his voice more a sussurating hiss than something substantial, a shadow’s voice.

“Excuse me, your Eminence? I do not understand your meaning,” Ser Zephirin answered, his voice still unsteady.

“Ha!” the Archbishop barked out, undeterred in his delight at provoking the young knight’s fear. “My skin, my skin! Bring me my skin, boy,” he said dripping smoky black fog onto the floor as he raised his over-long, ever overreaching arm to indicate a pile of blubbering flesh cast off in the farthest corner of the room. 

It was disgusting, still porous and sweating on the outside, as though the wearer had just engaged in some sort of physical exertion, and coated with layers of bloody mucous within. Smelly too, like a festering, and Zephirin couldn’t help but wrinkle his nose as he approached. That was just fine with Thordan. Disgust had a taste all its own, one that he’d acquired moons ago. Honestly though, he didn’t much care about the taste anymore as long as his emptiness was fed.

Who knew an empty skin could be so heavy? Despite the great strength Zephirin had acquired in his determined wielding of Shattered Heart, his substantial two-handed sword, the knight had difficulty keeping purchase on the slippery skin long enough to use his weight to pull it toward the Archbishop.

“Must I do everything myself!” sniffed Thordan, growing impatient. He was hungry after all. He covered the space between himself and the knight in one stride and easily took hold of his long-shed flesh. Folding himself inward and down, stooping into his skin, he flung it around his shoulders like a coat, fitting his eyes behind the still intact face as though it were a mask. Uncomfortable it was, surely, constricting, almost claustrophobic for him, but he couldn’t rightly make his rounds of Ishgard in his true form. Taking up a spool of fine, fine, spider-thin thread, obviously magic, invisible stuff, he handed it to his young attendant along with a sturdy tapestry needle. “Stitch me up the back,” he commanded.

“At once, your Holiness,” returned the boy, but Thordan could feel the very vibrations made in the air as his hands shook on the needle. Delicious, he thought, opening the mouth of his skin-mask wide and slurping the fleshy tongue through saliva-coated lips. Looking to generate more of the young knight’s delectable tremblings, he arched his long neck around to examine Zephirin as he started to seam the skin-coat together at the base of what would have been the Archbishop’s spine. He stared at the boy, a cutting stare, a stare that made use of the sole remaining trace of his prior corporeality within his new shadow self: the cold blue eyes that pierced through his false face.

\-------------------------------------------------------------------

Wicked shuffled about his cell in his excitement, tripping over his robes, over an errantly placed basket of fruit, over his own two feet on the bare and dusty wooden floorboards. No, he thought to himself. “No!” he spoke out loud, trying to make his voice firm. Not “Wicked” anymore, not “Wicked” at all -- Estinien had re-christened him “Wick,” and that’s who he would be, that’s the name he must learn to inhabit, to think of as himself, at least for a little while longer. 

He bent to pick the basket from the floor and smiled. Dusky red-brown pears, only just a little unripe, were the latest of a series of surreptitiously-left gifts from his one and only friend. The door to Wick’s cell, in that crouching stump of a tower on the Vault, had always been left unlocked. Who, after all, would venture to such a decrepit, isolated crevice? Who would wish to visit as despised and disparaged a creature as that which lurked therein? 

The answer was no one, not until recently at least. Lately however, when he’d returned from his duties, his observations, his forced daily ablutions, where he was doused with icy water as he sat naked in the tub and admonished to scrub himself red-skinned and raw by a cadre of priests who scrutinized every pass of the stiff boar-bristle brush over his luminous skin, he had found things altered in his room. 

The fire was always built higher, for one. Wick’s cell was warm, toasty warm even, and cords of bundled wood had been left to the side of the hearth, encouraging him to keep it that way. There were other things too, small gifts: a lantern to sit on the rickety table in the central room, a karakul skin to lay before the fire, several thick wool blankets to replace Wick’s thin one, parchment-wrapped packages of wrinkly figs and dates, once his friend had discerned, on one of his night visits, that Wick craved sweet things, and a stack of fine linen handkerchiefs, each embroidered very poorly with a red “W” in the lower left corner. 

Blushing, Estinien had apologized for the quality of his needlework, as well as for his inability to yet stitch the proper initial onto each square of cloth, the letter that represented Wick’s still elusive true name. Wick couldn’t have cared less; in fact, he liked to imagine that the “W” stood not for “Wick” at all, but for “Wyrmblood,” and that he was somehow included among those possessed of that surname, that he somehow had a right to it. But that was a lie, really, wasn’t it -- the more intimate sin of a lie told to himself. He knew precisely the “how” inherent in justifying his claim on Estinien’s name: he wished himself to be taken as his own by Estinien, to belong to him. So Wick nuzzled his perfect nose into each and every red-floss monogram, rubbed his face on them, kissed them with his pouting lips. However poor the result, that Estinien’s rough hands had themselves worked the delicate silk into linen made each mark all the more precious to the young monk. 

He busied himself, setting the fruit on his crooked table, determined as it was to still wobble back and forth despite Estinien’s repeated attempts, down on his hands and knees, to shim the offending leg. Then he paced for a bit, filled with nervous energy, before remembering to hang the kettle in the hearth, preparing for those dark hours before Matins when his friend would make his customary evening visit. Sensitive now to the noise of metal on stone, on the swollen and water-logged wood of his rotting stairs, Wick heard the familiar ‘clomp’ of footfalls before the door to his tower creaked open, letting the damp inside.

“Estinien!” he called, unable to keep the enthusiasm from his voice, unwilling to try even.

“Hello Wick,” returned the dragoon. “How does this evening find you, my friend?”

“Content,” he returned, “ now that you’re here, at least.”

Estinien let out a pleased grunt at the response and unfastened the clasps on his helm, slipping it off. Wick moved close then, pulling off his friend’s gauntlets and then kneeling to unbuckle his sabatons while Estinien himself worked to remove his chest plate and fauld. This was their nightly ritual. Once stripped of his armor, the Azure Dragoon reached up to remove the long u-shaped hairpins that held his flattened knot piled underneath his helm. He handed each pin into Wick’s bare hands as he removed them, shaking his silver-white hair onto his shoulders when he finished and waiting as the monk bustled off to fetch the hairbrush.

This had been yet another gift from Estinien to his friend, the silver-handled hairbrush that had been his late mother’s. Noticing on one of the earliest evenings they had spent in one another’s company that Wick could not restrain himself from combing his fingers through the snarls of Estinien’s tangles, the dragoon had considered that since he made no use of it himself, and since his friend seemed so insistent in his desire to see Estinien well-groomed, he would not only give the brush to Wick, but would allow the young monk to make use of it. Since then, it had been part of their routine: his armor removed, Estinien would sit before the hearth on the fluffy karakul skin he had provided them and allow Wick to brush out his hair until it was sleek and gleaming in the firelight. He even let the monk take one of those monogrammed handkerchiefs to his horns, permitting the obviously delighted young man to buff and polish them to his heart’s content. They shined like cut onyx before he was through with them. 

Then they would drink their tea. By this time they would both be nearly desperate in their need for the desire-dampening medicinal brew. Tonight, however, Estinien was able to push aside his mounting need for his friend in order to bestow upon him yet another gift. It was the silver hand-mirror that matched the hairbrush -- they’d been part of a set.

“I cannot take this, Estinien. It is too dear a gift, belonging to your mother, even,” Wick said. Here he made a motion to the hairbrush in his hand, then another to the plain silver disk held in place around Estinien’s neck by a matching silver chain. It was his mother’s locket, Wick knew, as he knew what was kept inside: a miniature of Estinien himself as a child and the lock of Wick’s own hair that the dragoon had shorn from him on their first evening together.

“By your own admission, you’ve never even seen your face properly. You realize you have neither name nor face, Wick, and while I’m working to restore the first, why should you be kept from the second -- particularly when it is so easy to supply?” the dragoon replied, his tone gentle, his fingers even more so as he reached to stroke an errant curl of dark hair behind Wick’s ear. The monk shivered at his friend’s touch. He had long since absolved himself of the need for his hood during Estinien’s visits, which made the dragoon’s self-restraint, now that there was more than just a scant inch of naked skin bared on Wick’s brow, even more impressive.

“I’ve seen myself, somewhat at least -- in the tub water when I bathe, in the well when I’m sent to fetch water, in the bucket when I scrub the floors,” Wick asserted. 

“Free of your veil, your goggles,” Estinien prodded.

“Of the veil, yes, while bathing, not the googles,” Wick admitted.

“You have never seen your own eyes, Wick. You don’t even know their colour, do you?” the silver-haired fiend continued to press, standing from the fire to move toward Wick’s sleeping area, where he intended to place the mirror at his bedside, summarily ending his friend’s protest by making the gift a fait accompli. Setting the mirror down beside the small crystal box he’d given Wick on the night he’d returned after their first encounter, the box in which Estinien knew his friend stored the winding plait of his own silver hair -- his pledge of honor and fidelity to the monk -- he heard the sudden intake of breath behind him, Wick’s pained gasp, and became cognizant of his misstep.

“Estinien, don’t!” the incubus said suddenly, his voice low and throaty. “Please!” he pleaded, “not over there.” His feet heavy as he willed them to stay in place, to not follow Estinien over, he found himself moving to his friend’s side regardless, powerless to the compulsion to be near his dragoon. “Estinien,” he repeated, breathless now, pushing himself close against the other man’s back.

“Wick,” Estinien responded, his breath starting to come short as he turned to face the monk. They could feel each other now, feel themselves bringing each other to tumescence as they pressed their bodies tight together. The bed was right there, right there beside them, and they  _ knew _ what they wanted of each other. All it would take would be one set of knees bending to sit, one hand pulling the other man to join him, to recline, to lie back amidst the blankets. Each of them shook with his need for it, his need for the other. 

It was the monk, however, who pulled back first, pulled back as he felt his friend’s body grow lax, felt it begin its descent to the bed. Wick knew his feelings for Estinien. He knew that he desired him beyond anything or anyone he had ever wanted, that his skin blistered for him, his blood flowed hot and purposeful, until he padded through his days in a state of near-perpetual half-hardness. The very thoughts in his head were fevered for the other man: when he shut his eyes, down on hands and knees as he scrubbed the endless stone floors of the kitchen, the washrooms, the priests’ chambers, he saw Estinien behind his closed lids; when he scurried through the halls, hood up and head bent to the ground, he imagined a glimpse of silver hair flashing in his peripherals; when, despite every straining attempt of a will that had been iron-strong enough to keep him from the indulgence for years, he finally closed his hand around himself beneath the gifted blankets that still smelled blessedly like his friend, he stroked himself to the rhythm of Estinien’s softly susurrated name. 

Wick knew he wanted to take Estinien, to take him and be taken by him, but he also knew that while the dragoon seemed to want the same, the monk could not be certain that his friend’s desires were not manipulated by what he, Wick,  _ was _ , by the wickedness so inherent to his kind that it made the priests christen him accordingly, made the entire religious community within which he was grudgingly kept revile him. Tears burned his eyes; tightness closed his throat; he felt as though a boot had been rammed into his stomach when he thought of pushing into the tight heat of an Estinien who was merely under his incubus spell. He could not bear it. And the fact that he could not bear the thought of his friend in mere thrall to him, that his body reacted so intensely against the idea, made him suspect that what he truly felt for Estinien was beyond desire; it was love. 

Grasping Estinien’s hands in his, Wick pulled him back away from the edge of the bed, pulled him to sit facing him at the hearth. The fiend offered little resistance, sinking to his knees as the monk took the kettle from the fire and poured hot water into his stubby, brown-glazed teapot. Within minutes, they were both alternating between blowing into their cups and taking small, scalding sips, desperately trying to partake of the herbal concoction that would quell their nearly ungovernable need for one another. 

“I...I want you...so much,” Estinien admitted between sips. “I can only barely control myself.”

“I know. I feel the same, Estinien. But I will _ not  _ have you tainted by what I am,” Wick replied, his voice suddenly vehement.

“The only taint is upon those who continue to torment you so, my friend, those who seek to convince you that you are anything but the blessing that replaced the loneliness of my long-stretching days with your warmth and gentle touches,” Estinien continued. “Let me kiss you at least. Remove your veil and let me feel your lips against my own. Please, Wick,” the dragoon pleaded.

Placing his cup and saucer on the stone hearth, Wick removed the veil that covered the lower half of his face, revealing his full lips, his perfectly sculpted jaw-line, his delicately up-turned nose, it’s pert tip just begging to be tapped by a fond hand.

“You are  _ so  _ beautiful,” Estinien said, staring as the firelight from the hearth rippled alternating waves of light and shadow across Wick’s newly exposed features. “The goggles. Take them off. I wish to see your eyes, Wick.” 

The other man obeyed, seemingly held within the kind of trance customarily attributed to his own wretched kind, but it was the incubus, this time, in seeming thralldom to the demi-fiend’s rough, raw, gravel-edged voice. He raised his hands to the heavy metal and glass frames, loosened the leather straps that bound the goggles around his head and lifted them off, looking down as he held them in his lap for a moment, fingering the so-familiar frames anxiously -- his ever-present companions for as long as he could remember -- before he lifted his face to look Estinien squarely in his eyes.

The Holy See’s mightiest warrior, its intrepid Azure Dragoon, was stunned as though he’d been struck to the ground from a height: he could not move; he could not speak; he could not rip his own eyes from the blazing gaze that held them until, from somewhere deep in his mind, he recalled “The Doctrine of the Eyes.” 

In his mother’s bedtime stories, there had been fanciful accounts of shield maidens and knights who, upon meeting the eyes of their true love, would be bound by them, held in place as beams of ardour shot from the eyes of one lover to twist and wreath themselves around the corresponding beams of his or her chosen. His mother had read him to sleep with those tales, with whispers that “love at first sight” was real. Estinien had never believed them, not even as a child. He had never believed until now.

“What is it, Estinien? What troubles you, my friend? Am I so very horrible to look at?” Wick asked, growing concerned at the other man’s utter stillness.

Estinien could not respond initially. Blue was the sole idea left in his mind as it became more and more crowded with what it was perceiving. Blue was what he was trying to process, as he weighed every shade of it he’d seen against what was before him and found them all but shadows in comparison. Blue was what he saw, the most perfect blue -- incomparable, strange, not of his world and yet currently filling it, re-making his entire reality into nothing but a colour he could not quite account for, could not quite believe in, like his mother’s fairy tales when he was a child.

Blue was what he saw... and so blue was, finally, what he spoke. 

“Blue,” said Estinien, the single word stumbling from his lips.

“Blue?” asked Wick, growing increasingly more concerned at his friend’s reactions to his unmasking. He lifted the goggles from his lap, intending to re-secure them over his face, when a hand shot out to close upon his wrist, restraining him.

“Blue,” Estinien repeated. “Your eyes are blue, Wick,” he said, running his free hand down the side of his friend’s face, his voice suddenly returned to him. “Wait here,” he whispered, standing up to fetch the hand-mirror from the bed-side stand where he’d left it. Strangely, the dragoon felt completely at ease now, placid even. It wasn’t as though his concupiscence had disappeared, but was more that he no longer felt compelled to act upon it -- and without even having finished the tea designed precisely for the purpose of curbing his desire for his friend. 

Estinien was completely in control of his passions, was smiling even -- a stupid love-struck grin transforming his usually somber demeanor -- when he returned to the hearthside and knelt beside his companion. “Look,” he told Wick, holding the silver mirror by its handle and turning it to face the young monk. Aside from shutting his eyes tight to the sight, Wick had no choice but to submit to his friend’s demand.

“Blue,” he said softly, lifting both of his long, pale hands to gently touch either side of his face. “My eyes are blue,” Wick said, widening those eyes in wonder.

Estinien had to force himself from staring at his friend, had no idea how long he had been doing so, by the time the bells rang out in the Vault’s high towers. It was the call to Matins. Wick would be late. Quickly, the monk covered his face, pulled the hood back over his head of thick sable curls, and allowed his friend to scoop him up in his strong dragoon arms. Once outside, Estinien shot from the top of the decrepit stairs with such force that Wick was afraid they’d be crumpled to the ground upon his return, but he chose not to worry for the moment, taking pleasure instead in being held so close to the other man’s chest. He nuzzled his face into Estinien’s bare neck as they descended, landing lightly on the darkened flagstones in a hidden crevice at the side of the Vault.

“I’ll wait for you here,” the dragoon said.

“You’ll freeze,” Wick replied, noting that Estinien had left without replacing his armor.

“I’ll be fine; hurry now! You’re late!” he said, manually turning Wick around and swatting him lightly on the rump to urge him forward.

Wick smiled then, underneath his replaced veil, and scuttled off with surprising celerity, his one backwards glance rewarded with an image of his pale-skinned friend standing in the shadows, the icy wind blowing his loose silver hair all about his bare face and swan-like neck.

When he’d made certain Wick had disappeared inside the Vault, Estinien turned around to peer into the darkness behind him. “Father,” he said 

“Hello Estinien,” said the older man, his voice betraying no surprise at his discovery. “The boy is right. You’ll freeze out here without your armor. Let us retreat to his cell for the moment; it will be some time before you must retrieve him, and I’ll make certain he’s not kept waiting.”

Estinien nodded once, then shot from the ground, feeling a similar percussive burst behind him as his father jumped just behind him. They both landed effortlessly, one after the other, on the rooftop just outside Wick’s tower. The stairs to his cell being fortunately still intact, Alberic followed Estinien inside, set his lance by the door, and sat down at Wick’s still-wobbling table, facing his son.

“This is where you’ve been, then,” Alberic said, glancing around the room, “where they keep the boy. Bah!” he snorted out. “It’s still too damp in here,” he continued, getting up from the table and adding another log to the fire, trying to coax the flames to further heat.

“You’ve been following me, father. Why?” Estinien asked.

“‘Tis not what you think,” Alberic replied without yet turning from the hearth to look at his son. “I am not trying to check up on you, to subject your actions to some kind of parental derision. You are grown now -- you’re your own man,” he said, finally turning from the fire, satisfied by the roaring blaze he’d nurtured. “I was merely curious. You seemed so happy as of late,” the older man offered. “I had thought that it might be a ‘someone’ who was making you so. What a ‘someone’ though, Estinien! I should have expected you would not choose what was easy... even in love.”

“Love?” Estinien scoffed, embarrassed. “I am not ‘in love.’”

“Aren’t you?” Alberic rejoined, amused. “I know that smile you wear on your face when you think you are alone, and it’s not the smile of a man who merely _ burns _ for the one who persists constant in his thoughts -- as might be expected from the nature of your choice.” Alberic paused for a moment and then laughed to himself, a loud, hearty laugh. “An incubus, Estinien? Really? And the one and only of his kind yet housed in Ishgard? Oh, my dearest boy, you certainly can pick them,” he said, laughing again and slapping himself on the knee.

Blood rushed so hard to Estinien’s face that even the tips of his ears blazed cherry red. “I am not…” he began, and then realized he could not deny it, did not wish to deny his feelings for Wick. He looked down at his hands, then looked back up at his father, questioning. “I am in love with him?” he asked timidly, earnest in his appeal to a superior wisdom.

“Oh, yes, my child,” Alberic replied emphatically. “I very much believe you are. I myself once wore that same smile for your mother,” he said, grinning at his son then, wrinkles crinkling at the corners of his eyes. “Still, Estinien. We must be careful. There is something about that boy -- whispers spread more fervidly than those usually circulated about his kind.”

“He doesn’t have a name, father. No trace of one that I can find, and I’ve been looking most fervently,” Estinien blurted out, eager now, that his secret was exposed, to share his frustrations with his father. He had never been accustomed to keeping things from Alberic and was relieved at being suddenly released from the need to remain so guarded.

“No name?” Alberic said in disbelief. “But he must have one. ‘Tis in the Halonic Code.”

“I know it, and so I told him, but Wick has no knowledge of his true name.”

“Wick?” Alberic asked, tilting his head to the side. “Is that what they call him?”

“The priests call him ‘Wicked,’ just as maliciously as they name the other lost sons of Ishgard, the bastards and orphans,” Estinien replied, heat in his voice. “I call him ‘Wick’ -- it’s my name for him until I can find his true one, his true name,” the younger man continued. “They treat him despicably, father. Wick did not even know what he truly looked like, did not even know the colour of his own eyes until this very night,” Estinien continued, growing more vehement. “I brought him mother’s looking glass,” he said, gesturing to where the mirror lay on the karakul skin beside its matching, silver-handled brush.

“And what colour are they, my boy?” asked Alberic, smiling ever so fondly at his son.

“They are blue, father; his eyes are coloured the _ Fury’s own _ blue,” Estinien replied, his own eyes growing large in wonder at recounting what he had witnessed, like a child telling his father he had caught Father Christmas bending to fill a stocking at the family hearth.

Alberic laughed again and moved forward to embrace his son. “I hadn’t thought it would give me such joy to see you in love,” he said softly into his son’s initially stiffened shoulder. He felt his boy soften against him, then, fully returning his embrace, before he continued: “You’ve always been such a solitary child, so self-sufficient and assured. I had feared you might also be lonely.”

“I  _ was _ lonely,” Estinien admitted as his father drew back and returned to the chair across from him. “I just wasn’t aware of it until, after having made a friend, I realized how miserable I’d been before him,” he continued, dropping his eyes to stare at his long, slender fingers, self-conscious in his admission, even before his own father. “I promised I would find his name though, father, his true name. I gave him my pledge,” he said with sudden fierceness, snapping his eyes back to his father’s face before pushing hard from the table and going to retrieve the crystal box at Wick’s bedside. Returning, he showed Alberic the strands of plaited hair curled lovingly inside, a plait that, from its distinctive silver-white colour, could only be his own. “See, father,” he said.

“I do, Estinien. I do see. And I think I may just have an idea about where you could start looking, though it may take you farther afield from Ishgard than you might like,” said the older man.

“But my duties,” Estinien started, “and Wick. The priests are so careless in their use of him, assigning him the most filthy tasks -- some containing a degree of danger -- that I have sworn to myself to watch over him, even as he goes about his days unaware of my shepherding.”

“Child, child,” Alberic muttered soothingly. “Do you think me so inured to the demands of young love, of first love e’en? Do you think I’ve forgotten how it feels?”

Estinien looked at his father then, looked closely, and he felt a sudden sense of shame fill his chest. His father had been lonely too. “I miss her as well,” he said.

“Your mother was possessed of a superlatively romantic heart, and would surely have known better how to advise you,” Alberic said with a heaving sigh. “But know this, my dear one: as you have chosen this boy as  _ yours _ , so he is just as surely  _ mine _ . I will guard him while you fulfill your pledge,” he said, his voice firm. “And _ I  _ will resume the duties of the Azure Dragoon -- there’s still some strength in these old bones yet,” he laughed.

“But father, I couldn’t allow…” the younger man began to protest.

“Estinien,” his father interrupted, “who better to grant respite to the current Azure Dragoon than the former one, perhaps the sole person who knows fully what’s required?” he asked, expecting no answer. “Come now, it will soon be time for you to reclaim your...love, lover? What is he to you, truly, Estinien, because he is surely more than your friend?”

The younger fiend blushed to his hairline, to the very tips of his ears, and down to his chest, a patch of which was peeking through the deep “V” of his shirt. For a moment his throat was too tight to respond to his father. “We are not yet...lovers,” he stuttered out, finally. 

“Come now, boy, ‘tis a perfectly natural thing, to make love, especially considering the nature of your choice. The both of you must possess impressive strength of will to have resisted each other so far,” Alberic said gently, genuinely surprised both that the incubus boy had thus far foreborn the call of his own nature and that Estinien had weathered the incubus’ inherent charms. Considering how fondly he had watched the two regard each other at their separation by the Vault’s doors, he realized that their mutual resistance to further physical intimacy, most likely thinking it might somehow harm one or the other of them, could mean nothing else but that his son and his friend were already deeply attached. Alberic became more determined than ever, then, making a silent vow of his own. 

Out loud, he hurried Estinien to his feet, reminding him that Wick’s observations were nearly finished. After retrieving his lance, he gave Estinien a quick nod, bade him good night, and then left his son to retrieve his beloved in peace. In the morning, he would share his leads with Estinien -- his ideas about where his son might seek to uncover Wick’s true name -- but for now Alberic had to do some digging of his own. With a light scuff of metal on stone, the retired Azure Dragoon took to the sky, startling, on his return to earth several moments later, the young knight guarding House de Fortemps.

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The Fey Queen was drawn in starker lines than the Ladies of her Court, starker and stronger -- a strength necessary to withstanding the periodic attentions of her King. Her eyes were adamant, too black to find the pupil, and her wings, unlike the fine transparent film of most fey, were opaque, like faceted diamonds. Stare at her wings long enough, and one would see, deep within, the blazing heat refracted light can kindle. 

Her wood, while as populated with trees as was her consort’s, was less oppressive, the slender trunks of birch trees allowing more light to reach beneath their boughs of small, ragged-edges leaves, light that reflected off silver-white bark to cast the forest floor in something akin to starshine and moonglow. Even during Summer’s bright day, the Fey Queen’s was a dominion of night -- a soft night though, a gentle dark, a perpetual midsummer dream. 

That night, the Queen paused by her favorite stream. Dancing with surface sparks as it leapt between root and rock, rushed past its willow-attended banks and burbled excitedly, the stream spilled its secret as it tumbled past -- a secret of some importance, prompting the Queen to hurry back to her Court.

“Fallen!” the Queen shouted as she swept into the hidden glade; her too-exposed bower had long been abandoned. “Someone fetch Lady Fallen Afoul!” she commanded.

“She’s on the prowl again, my Queen,” her tiny human page reported, bowing prettily before her. 

“Sweet thing,” replied the Fey Queen, patting the child’s head of chestnut curls, distracted for a moment as she recalled which of her ladies she’d placed in his stead as a changeling. Was it Lady Return to Me or Lady Peace at Last? The Queen could not recall. “Well then,” she continued, coming back to her thoughts as she shooed the boy to his duties with a waving gesture of her hand,”I suppose I must fetch her myself.” She heard her own voice trailing to a whisper as she considered. The news could not wait. Lady Fallen’s long lost son had entered the Feylands, had entered the Feylands and had the misfortune of meeting her King. And if that were not cause enough for haste, his fellow demi-fey, the son of her poor lost Lady Most Loved, had followed fast upon his heels. Ishgard’s Azure Dragoon was now within the boundaries of the Fey King’s grove. 

Her actions belied the urgency of her thoughts, however, as she sat staring after the page, seemingly frozen. The boy resumed his position at the side of the Fey Queen’s most fierce Ladies-in-Waiting, warriors of devastating skill and her staunchest defenders save the missing Lady Fallen Afoul. They should be enough, she thought to herself. Lady Fallen and I will soon return, hopefully with both young fiends in our keeping. Lady Before ‘Tis Too Late and Lady Far, Far Away are guard enough in our absence, each a most ardent Votress of my order, the Queen thought, staring intently at the darkened cave opening in front of which her ladies and page were stationed. She shook her head, then, rousing herself, and the Fey Queen of the Twelveswood started back into her forest.

**Author's Note:**

> Oh shoot! This was not supposed to be posted yet. It's still not quite ready. I hit the wrong button. Well, I guess it's here now; sorry for the roughness.


End file.
